Integrating Social Media and Search Marketing

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B2B marketers have woken up to realise the potential of social media optimization as an effective marketing channel. This comes with the social media boom that has been observed over the past 2-3 years. But most marketers fail to assess the viability of social media. To overcome this one needs to find out the areas where integration of search and social has resulted in success.

To do so a marketer first needs to understand the value he/she is expecting to bring out from his engagements with social media. To start off, a good step would be to determine your social media KPI (key performance index). This would help you to take actions which are in sync with your business goals. For instance, if your aim is that the user downloads the white paper that you have put on offer, it makes more sense if you can create a group of readers who are more willing to engage in downloading rather than restricting themselves to spreading the buzz.

Secondly, you need to figure out who your audience is. It is important to set up search programs which focus on the specific needs of a specific stakeholder. To do so, uncover the vocabulary used by that specific stakeholder with the help of social monitoring tools and include that vocabulary into your program. Your program should also address to specific hot-button topics.

Thirdly, instead of focusing entirely on keyword phrases with the help of SEO, try to influence conversations through social media. When you create a page for your organization in a social media site, you create a virtual persona of the organization. Moreover, if that virtual persona becomes popular with many fans or followers, it can even adopt a slightly authoritative tone to channel conversations around keyword phrases your organization is best-positioned for.

Finally you need to understand that the era of sharing online content via bogs and referencing is gone. In today’s world of Twitter and Facebook, content is shared through tweets and wall posts. Moreover Google does not monitor links from social media networks unless a link is mentioned too frequently. Hence you can use this advantage to the hilt and start promotion of share-worthy content of your organization through social networking sites